Worse still, Marx’s attachment to racial phrenology is confirmed in one of his letters to Engels, in which Marx complains about the German radical Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) who visited Marx in London in 1862:

Dear Engels,

From the enclosed scrawls you will partly see how bothered I am. ....

The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and capital were guaranteed. In this he bases himself on the view that he ought to live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron (no doubt by the countess). Just imagine! This fellow, knowing about the American affair, etc., and hence about the state of crisis I’m in, had the insolence to ask me whether I would be willing to hand over one of my daughters to la Hatzfeldt as a ‘companion’, and whether he himself should secure Gerstenberg’s (!) patronage for me! The fellow has wasted my time and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any ‘business’ just now, but merely upon a ‘theoretical work’, I might just as well kill time with him! In order to keep up certain dehors vis-à-vis the fellow, my wife had to put in pawn everything that wasn’t actually nailed or bolted down! ….

It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like. ....

While Friedrich Engels’ views on evolution were confused (he, for example, at times held the Lamarckian view that environmentally-acquired traits could be inherited), Engels shared Marx’s belief in races, and Engels’ own writings show that he thought that there were racial differences caused by evolution, including differences in general intelligence:

“… modern natural science has extended the principle of the origin of all thought content from experience in a way that breaks down its old metaphysical limitation and formulation. By recognising the inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experienced is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian negro.”
Friedrich Engels, Appendix: Notes to Anti-Dühring
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/appendix1.htm

“The superior development of Aryans and Semites is, perhaps, attributable to the copious meat and milk diet of both races, more especially to the favorable influence of such food on the growth of children. As a matter of fact, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico who live on an almost purely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians in the lower stage of barbarism who eat more meat and fish.” (Engels 1909: 32).

I cannot verify the statements made in Breitbart about the American Marxist Victor Berger, who supposedly said that “There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and indeed the Mongolian have the start of them in civilization by many thousand years,” though this statement is quoted in scholarly secondary literature as having been said by him.

But what can be said is that, even if they held them, in their opposition to, say, immigration these American socialists/Marxists like Victor Berger did not invoke such racial views, as can be conclusively seen in the public statements and resolutions of the Socialist Party of Americahere, here, here, of which Victor Berger was a prominent member. In reality, these socialists argued against mass immigration on pragmatic economic and social grounds, but did allow immigration of people suffering persecution, and did not call for immigration exclusion of people on the basis simply of their race.

But to return to the general point: as the author of the Breitbart article points out, must all the statues and monuments to socialists, Marxists and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels be pulled down too, because of their racial views? If not, why not?

A secondary point is: are all these other accusations about early socialists in Breitbart accurate?

The article seems to imply that the newspaper Appeal to Reason (which existed from 1895 to 1922 and which became a leading socialist publication after 1901) supported some kind of state-enforced racial discrimination and forced segregation of blacks.

Is this true? Breitbart seems to be referring to a book called Leaves of Life: A Story of Twenty Years of Socialist Agitation (Girard, Kansas, 1912) by Julius Augustus Wayland, a radical American socialist who had founded Appeal to Reason in 1895, and who published the writings of other leading socialists like Jack London, Mary Harris Jones (“Mother” Jones), Upton Sinclair and Eugene Debs.

Here is the relevant passage:

“THE NEGRO AND SOCIALISM.Socialism will solve the race question, and that, too, without a single reference to race and without denying to any person a single right accorded any other person. It will be done in just the way the government or society now employs colored soldiers or provides schools for them separate from the whites. Take, for instance, some great factory. The workers will make the regulations, governing the industry. It would require a majority of the workers to consent to the employment of colored, Chinese, or any other race in that particular factory, a consent not likely to be given. As every citizen would have the right of employment, a rejection of any race would necessitate the erection of a plant of that or some other character in which such colored citizens would be separated from the whites and the whites from the colored people, one not more than the other. The colored race would have the same right to reject or accept the association of whites. It would be to the interest of all to have the colored race furnished with the same good machinery to work with and the same good homes and schools and everything, as the result of their labor would be a matter of interest to all. Thus they would live as well as the whites and have every surrounding to develop and unfold them that could be placed about them. There would be communities or sections of blacks, of Chinese, or of any other races and nationalities, if there were such citizens. You might fear that such guarantee of employment and capital by the public would result in flooding this country with the hordes from other lands. Yes, if a majority of the people here should vote to admit them. But that is not likely. You see the public would own all the land, machinery and means of exchange, and no one could find a place to work, except the majority should make regulations admitting them. They come in now by the millions, with or without your consent, because the private owners of industries can hire them cheaper than you want to work for. You would need the anti-Chinese laws and other farces then. No, Chinamen might come, but Chinamen would not be able to work and live here without your consent. Thus you see that private ownership of industries mixes up the races, reducing blacks, whites and yellows to a common level, while socialism would separate the races and lift them all to the highest level of which each were capable. It would do this without denying one any right possessed by another, without denying employment to any class, and without permitting any to take profit off another. All the hell you see in the fields of industry today, all the riots, strikes and threatened revolution are the results of private ownership, where should be public ownership. All is the result of one set trying to squeeze profit out of the other in some industry. When you get wise you will abolish this hell and institute a heaven.” (Wayland 1912: 128–130).

A careful reading of this passage shows it doesn’t support the idea that Julius Augustus Wayland advocated some kind of state-enforced racial discrimination to oppress blacks, nor universal state-forced segregation of blacks.

Rather, the socialist world imagined by Wayland supported some kind of democratic and voluntary association and integration or voluntary separation, in accordance with the mutual wishes of workers and communities.

That might sound harsh by modern standards, but it’s hardly the picture strongly implied by Breitbart. Of course, the passage does show that, in Wayland’s view, ordinary American white workers probably would not have wanted to be integrated with other races, but that is a commentary on the general social attitudes and general racial feelings in early 20th century America, not on the socialist system Wayland advocated per se.

Nor did Wayland wish to oppress blacks or deny them employment or equal rights. This is perfectly clear in his explicit statements:

“Socialism will solve the race question, and that, too, without a single reference to race and without denying to any person a single right accorded any other person. …. As every citizen would have the right of employment, a rejection of any race would necessitate the erection of a plant of that or some other character in which such colored citizens would be separated from the whites and the whites from the colored people, one not more than the other. The colored race would have the same right to reject or accept the association of whites. …. socialism …. would do this without denying one any right possessed by another, without denying employment to any class, and without permitting any to take profit off another.” (Wayland 1912: 128–130).

As an aside, it is clear that Julius Augustus Wayland was not in favour of open borders, as in the case of other early American socialists as described here, here, here, but had a peculiar view of how to control borders:

“You might fear that such guarantee of employment and capital by the public would result in flooding this country with the hordes from other lands. Yes, if a majority of the people here should vote to admit them. But that is not likely. You see the public would own all the land, machinery and means of exchange, and no one could find a place to work, except the majority should make regulations admitting them. They come in now by the millions, with or without your consent, because the private owners of industries can hire them cheaper than you want to work for. You would need the anti-Chinese laws and other farces then. No, Chinamen might come, but Chinamen would not be able to work and live here without your consent. Thus you see that private ownership of industries mixes up the races, reducing blacks, whites and yellows to a common level, while socialism would separate the races and lift them all to the highest level of which each were capable.” (Wayland 1912: 128–130).

But, as we have seen from the context of the whole passage, Wayland thought that separation would be democratic and voluntary, and – whatever you think about the morality of any of this – Wayland’s views were not as extreme and sinister as the way they were portrayed by Breitbart.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

In essence, if there was any doubt at all that the Cultural Left has massive ideological control of popular social media like YouTube and tech companies like Google, then there can be no doubt now.

Sargon of Akkad exposures the massive private censorship on YouTube:

And Sargon himself has been suspended from Twitter:

I had my differences with Sargon on economics and his feeble “Classical Liberal” world-view, but he did heroic work exposing SJW lies and insanity, and these social media purges and Orwellian censorship are ominous signs.

Friday, August 11, 2017

The BBC produced a cartoon as part of their “The Story of Britain” series called “Roman Britain”.

In the original description (which the BBC has since changed), the family depicted was described as a “typical family:

The video presents a black person as a high-status Roman officer and, according to the description above, as the head of a “typical family”:

But why on earth is a person who appears to be a sub-Saharan African (or possibly an indigenous North African) being depicted as a head of a “typical family” in Roman Britain?

To be “typical,” this entails that this is what the average family looked like, whether of Roman personnel in Britain or of all people in Roman Britain generally, and that in turn entails that the majority of Roman personnel or the majority of all people in Roman Britain were sub-Saharan Africans or indigenous North Africans.

Such an idea is, of course, outrageously nonsensical.

And citing evidence of some few sub-Saharan Africans or indigenous North Africans in Britain cannot possibly prove that the majority of Roman personnel or the majority of all people in Roman Britain were of that ethnic identity.

So what was the meaning of this Tweet? Was Mary Beard suggesting that a family headed by a sub-Saharan African or indigenous North African was a “typical family” in Roman Britain and the majority of people were like this?

A review of her Twitter feed and the TLS article here (see also here) shows that Beard quickly tried to oppose the criticisms of her Tweet by saying her defence only meant that the idea that a Roman family headed by a black man in Britain was “possible,” or that there is some evidence of low-level ethnic diversity in Roman Britain (neither of which reasonable people dispute).

Mary Beard also suggested that the black man was “loosely based …on Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain,” even though Quintus Lollius Urbicus was a North African Berber, and the idea that Berber families were “typical” of Roman Britain is also laughable.

The main issue that critics of the cartoon were pointing to is this: how can a family headed by a sub-Saharan African (or possibly an indigenous North African) possibly have been a “typical family” in Roman Britain, when that requires that most people were like this?

Instead of honestly answering this question, the social media debate quickly got side-tracked into secondary issues, such as whether there was ethnic diversity and foreigners in Roman Britain at all (and clearly there was some kind of low-level ethnic diversity on Roman Britain).

Is there even one high-profile Classicist or ancient historian in Britain today who has the courage and intellectual honesty to state that the BBC’s video was an outrageous travesty of history? Is there any such Classicist or ancient historian capable of saying publicly that “of course it is ridiculous and politically correct nonsense to state, as the BBC did, that a family headed by a sub-Saharan African (or indigenous North African) was a “typical family” in Roman Britain in the sense of being average.”

Well, maybe there are such people, but I’ve yet to see one.

Most damning for all the apologists for the BBC is that they quietly went and changed the description in the original video to this:

Well, well, well. It’s almost like the BBC realise their original description was absurd. But can modern classicists admit this too? Can Mary Beard admit this?

And note well: this was the major issue that critics of the BBC had, and all other points are secondary or minor. But – be that as it may – let us now turn to some minor issues.

Minor Issues1. The Historia Augusta, the Ethiopian, and Black Skin as a Bad Omen
In the various Twitter debates, there was discussion of a passage in an ancient Latin source called the Historia Augusta, a series of imperial biographies probably written in the late 4th or early 5th century BC.

In this work, there is a biography of the emperor Septimius Severus, who ruled from 14 April 193 to 4 February 211, and he died in Eboracum (York) in Britain. This biography describes the last years of Severus’ life when he was on campaign in Britain, and troubled by omens of his own death.

A passage from Severus’ biography was used by Beard in her TLS article here to prove that there were blacks in Roman Britain.

The passage runs as follows, with the Latin first and a translation from the online Loeb Classical Library edition of 1921, but with a revised translation of the important part at the end:

“4. On another occasion, when he [sc. Severus] was returning to his nearest quarters from an inspection of the wall at Luguvallum in Britain, at a time when he had not only proved victorious but had concluded a perpetual peace, just as he was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian soldier, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable jester, met him with a garland of cypress-boughs. 5. And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, troubled as he was by the omen both of the man’s colour and of the garland, the Ethiopian by way of jest cried, it is said, ‘You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.’”
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/historia_augusta/septimius_severus*.html

Assuming that the story is even real (and the major modern biographer of Severus raises doubts: see Birley 1988: 184), what does this story prove?

It certainly does not prove that the majority of Roman personnel in Britain were sub-Saharan Africans. And the context of the passage suggests that seeing a black man in the British army was an unusual sight, because if sub-Saharan Africans were common and in large numbers in Britain, then why would Severus have been surprised or startled to meet one?

The passage also shows that the Romans had a superstitious fear of black skin, because black was regarded as an ill-omened colour (Snowden 2001: 260).

Recent work by Starks (2011) presents evidence that this was by no means an unusual attitude amongst the Romans at all, and that colour prejudice was also a prevalent social phenomenon:

Even worse, we have evidence of another episode like this that occurred in 42 BC before the second battle of Philippi in the army of Marcus Junius Brutus.

The translation below from Plutarch’s Life of Brutus follows the Loeb Classical Library edition of 1918, but with an emended translation of the crucial passage (and the Greek text following):

“48.1. On that night, they say, the phantom visited Brutus again, manifesting the same appearance as before, but went away without a word. 2. Publius Volumnius, however, a philosopher, and a companion of Brutus in all his campaigns, makes no mention of this omen, but says that the foremost standard was covered with bees; …. 4. He says also that just before the battle itself two eagles fought a pitched battle with one another in the space between the camps, and as all were gazing at them, while an incredible silence reigned over the plain, the eagle towards Brutus gave up the fight and fled. 5. And the story of the Ethiopian is well known, who, as the gate of the camp was thrown open, met the standard-bearer, and was cut to pieces by the soldiers, because they thought [him] an omen.” (ὁ δ᾽ Αἰθίοψ περιβόητος γέγονεν, ὁ τῆς πύλης ἀνοιχθείσης ἀπαντήσας τῷ φέροντι τὸν ἀετὸν καὶ κατακοπεὶς ταῖς μαχαίραις ὑπὸ τῶν στρατιωτῶν οἰωνισαμένων).
Plutarch, Brutus, 48.1–5
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/brutus*.html

Both of the passages above suggest that your average Roman solider was so superstitious that the sight of a black man before some crucial moment (like a battle) was considered a terribly bad omen. In fact, in the case of the soldiers of Brutus, the soldiers slaughtered the poor African man on the spot in a murderous assault.

So why, then, would Romans import large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans into their armies if they were so superstitious? Such evidence suggests that blacks in general were likely to have been a tiny minority in the Roman army, and not common at all.

2. The Ethnicity of the Emperor Septimius Severus
Mary Beard in her TLS article here stated that “Even in the case of Septimius Severus, the first Roman emperor from Africa (Libya), we don’t actually know the colour of his skin, how far he was ‘native’, how far the descendent of Italian settler.”

And yet Anthony Birley – the major scholarly biographer of the emperor Septimius Severus – established that Septimius Severus was descended from Roman Italian colonists in north Africa on his mother’s side and wealthy Punic (or Punic-Libyan) magnates in Leptis Magna on his father’s side (see Birley 1988: 8, 212–226; see here). This means that, at most, Septimius Severus would have had swarthy skin like the southern Italians or the native people of North Africa. It is absurd to claim that Septimius Severus would have had black skin like sub-Saharan Africans. We also have portrait statues of Septimius Severus, and he does not look like a sub-Saharan African.

Thus Mary Beard – if she bothered to read Anthony Birley’s Septimius Severus: The African Emperor (1988; rev. edn. 1999) – was being straightforwardly disingenuous when she asserted that “Even in the case of Septimius Severus, the first Roman emperor from Africa (Libya), we don’t actually know the colour of his skin, how far he was ‘native’, how far the descendent of Italian settler.” The genealogy established by modern research, however, does allow us to talk about Severus’ ancestry with reasonable confidence, and his skin colour.

Snowden, Frank M. 2001. “Attitudes towards Blacks in the Greek and Roman World: Misinterpretations of the Evidence,” in Edwin M. Yamauchi (ed.), Africa and Africans in Antiquity. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing. 246–275.

c. 73,000 BC (± 900 years) – Lake Toba supervolcanic eruption (in Sumatra, Indonesia). This is the largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, it had global consequences for human populations: it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make-up of the human world-wide population to the present

75,000 years ago – Homo sapiens left Africa again about across the Bab el Mandib, connecting Ethiopia and Yemen into Middle East

70,000 years ago – cold, dry low point; most of northern Europe and Canada were covered by thick ice sheets

c. 41,000–c. 26,000 BC – the Aurignacian culture is found in Europe (probably associated with GoyetQ116 type people), the archaeological culture of the Upper Palaeolithic; this first appears in Eastern Europe around c. 41,000 BC, and spread into Western Europe c. 38,000 and 34,000 BC, but replaced by the Gravettian culture c. 26,000 to 24,000 BC

c. 38,000 BC – time of the proposed proto-language that developed into the proto-Amerind and proto-Eurasiatic languages spoken around the northeast coast of Asia; the linguist Joseph Greenberg dates this to 13,000 to 9,000 BC; this proposed proto-language might have been descended from proto-Austric or proto-Sino-Tibetan

c. 38,000 BC – earliest proposed date for the beginning of human settlement of Alaska and north America via the Bering straits

c. 38,000 BC – Paleolithic hunter-gatherers live in Japan

35,000–12,000 BC – European hunter-gatherers descend from a single ancestral population with no significant genetic inflow from other regions

c. 29,000–c. 22,000 BC – the Gravettian tool-making culture of the European Upper Paleolithic of Vestonice cluster type people; ice age glaciation seems to have wiped out Gravettian culture people c. 22,000 BC

28,000 BC – East Asia was reached by Homo sapiens

28,000–13,000 BC – last cool phase of the Ice age; humans withdraw from north Eurasia to more southerly areas

c. 27,000–18,000 BC – Last Glacial Maximum (when the ice sheets were at their greatest extension) c. 24,500 BC; deglaciation began in the Northern Hemisphere gradually from c. 18,000 to 17,000 BC

c. 22,000–13,000 BC – Mal’ta-Buret’ culture on the upper Angara River in the area west of Lake Baikal in the Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia. These people were important for the genetic ancestry of Siberians, Native Americans and Bronze Age Yamnaya people. The Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) population was either the people of the Mal’ta-Buret’ culture or a closely-related population

This language family is probably older than the Eurasiatic family, and Dené-Caucasian spread in a first migration, and was later overrun by Eurasiatic. See the family tree here. A proposed homeland is the Sino-Tibetan homeland in south China c. 30,000 BC. Proto-Dené-Caucasian speakers might have migrated into the steppe, east and west, and to the west along the Silk Road into Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and Europe. Original connections between the East and West Dene-Caucasian groups are probably older than 10,000 years

c. 13,000 BC – spread of the proposed proto-Eurasiatic language (of Joseph Greenberg, Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Stanford, 2000) giving rise to the Eurasiatic language family, possibly from a refuge area in the Last Glacial Maximum, including

See here. Amerind is possibly a sister language group of the Eurasiatic languages, and some scholars date proto-Eurasiatic to c. 38,000 BC and place its homeland in the north Pacific coast of Asia, with proto-Amerind; proto-Amerind then spread into America and Eurasiatic langauges into central Asia through the steppe. Proto-Eurasiatic might have descended from proto-Nilo-Saharan, proto-Afroasiatic, proto-Dravidian, proto-Dene-Caucasian, or proto-Austric. Austric may be the parent language of proto-Eurasiatic, and migrations of Eurasiatic speakers displaced earlier Dené–Caucasian languages

12,700–10,700 BC – Bølling-Allerød interstadial, the first important warm and moist period at the end of the last glacial period; in certain regions, there was a cold period called the Older Dryas during the middle of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial

12,500–9,500 BC – the Natufian culture in the Levant; harvesting of wild plants allows more free time; Natufians may have spoken a proto-Afroasiatic language, but others disagree

c. 12,180–11,780 BC – possibly a great migration to Europe from the west via Italy?; Villabruna branch ancestry people spread out; during this time after the Ice Age, there was population movement into Europe from either the Near East or the Balkans of the Villabruna Cluster people, some of whom had a genetic affinity to east Asians (Fu, Posth et al. 2016)

c. 12,000 BC – beginning of possible migration from the Near East or the Balkans of the Villabruna Cluster people into Europe

after c. 12,000 BC – a subset of European hunter-gatherers of the Villabruna branch people have some East Asian-related DNA (possible migration of Dene Caucasian speakers into Europe and the Caucasus and Anatolia?)

12,000–8,000 BC – most mammoths die out; small population of 500–1000 woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island until 1,650 BC

c. 12,000 BC – dogs probably domesticated by the Natufians in the Near East

12,000–300 BC – the hunter-gatherer Jōmon culture in Japan; some estimates put it as early as 14,500 BC

11,000 BC
c. 11,000–8,000 BC – the Late Glacial or Tardiglacial, the beginning of the warm period when the Northern Hemisphere warmed substantially with significant accelerated deglaciation after the Last Glacial Maximum (c. 23,000–11,000 years ago). Human beings in refuge areas started to repopulate northern Europe and Eurasia. See the map here

c. 11,000 BC – the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (now underwater plateaus south-east of Newfoundland on the North American continental shelf) were glaciated during the last glacial maximum, but left exposed as the ice sheets melt

c. 11,000 BC – outflow of water from Lake Agassiz (which may have been the largest lake on Earth then) into the Arctic Ocean

c. 11,000–9,000 BC – Windermere interstadial in Britain, the warm phase at the end of the last glaciation preceding the Younger Dryas; perhaps it began 12,000 BC

10,900–9,700 BC – mini ice age called the Younger Dryas causes sharp decline in temperatures over much of the northern hemisphere. Younger Dryas was triggered by vast meltwater probably from Lake Agassiz flowing into the North Atlantic, which caused disruption to thermohaline circulation

10,000 BC – possible human population at 4 million
c. 10,000 BC – Jericho is a settlement, and before that a camping ground for Natufian hunter-gatherer groups

c. 10,000 BC – the Komsa culture (Komsakulturen), a Mesolithic culture of hunter-gatherers in Northern Norway, in which the Komsa people settled the Norwegian coastline as glaciation receded at the end of the last ice age (11,000 and 8000 BC); the Komsa may be proto-Saami speakers

10,200–8,000 BC – settlement of Mureybet, on the west bank of the Euphrates in northern Syria:

7,000 BC
c. 7,000–2,000 BC – time of the Proto-Uralic language, ancestral to the Uralic language family; the Proto-Uralic homeland may have been around the Kama River, close to the Great Volga Bend and the Ural Mountains; Proto-Uralic language diverged into Proto-Samoyedic and Proto-Finno-Ugric:

c. 6,500 BC – Can Hasan III is an aceramic Neolithic settlement in south Turkey

c. 6,500–4,000 BC – Neolithic Anatolian farmers from northern Greece and north-western Turkey started migrate into central Europe through the Balkan route and then by the Mediterranean route to the Iberian Peninsula (see here)

c. 6,500 BC – first known settlement in southern Mesopotamia established at Eridu by farmers with the Hadji Muhammed culture, which was derived from the Samarran culture of north Mesopotamia; the archaeological history of Sumer:

c. 6,100 BC – Britain gradually becomes an island after a tsunami from the underwater Storegga Slide and the later bursting of Lake Agassiz (which flooded the oceans and caused sea levels to rise in the space of two years) permanently floods Doggerland (Dogger Bank, an upland area of Doggerland, is believed to have remained as an island until at least 5000 BC)

6,000–5,000 BC – the time of the Proto-Altaic language with its homeland in Central Asian steppes. The Altaic languages:

Turkic
Mongolic
Tungusic

6,000 BC – the Copper Age begins in the Fertile Crescent; the Torres Strait (separating Australia from New Guinea) is formed as sea levels rise

c. 6,000 BC – the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (underwater plateaus south-east of Newfoundland on the North American continental shelf) are submerged by rising sea levels

5,000–4,000 BC – the Sahara in its wet phase may have been home to the proto-Semitic speakers

4,300–3,300 BC – Chalcolithic age in the Near East

4,000 BC – possible human population at 7 million

c. 4,000–3,000 BC – beginning of migrations of the Austronesian-speaking people from Taiwan to the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia and the Pacific islands (see map here).

c. 4,000 BC – the Proto-Sino-Tibetan language still undifferentiated; the Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland was possibly around the sources of the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy rivers

c. 3,900 BC – the Sahara becomes a desert during Bond event 4 or the 5.9 kiloyear event. A severe drought occurs ending the Ubaid period and a migration of people from the Sahara in search of food and water to Egypt

c. 3,500 BC – the Sahara becomes a desert and Proto-Semites may have emigrated into the Nile Delta and Palestine; the collapse of the Ghassulian culture in Palestine c. 3,300 BC may have been caused by this migration

c. 3,400—c. 2,000 BC – the Kura–Araxes culture (or early trans-Caucasian culture) spread from the Ararat plain north into the Caucasus by 3,000 BC, and then south Caucasus, northwestern Iran, the northeastern Caucasus, eastern Turkey, and Syria; these people were ancestors of Hurrian, Urartian and Northeast Caucasian language speakers; (see map here); most probably home of proto-Hurro-Urartian, which developed into Hurrian, Urartian and possibly the Kassite language. See the map here. Also dated to 3,500 to 2,450 BC

2,400–2,000/1,700 BC – Indo-Europeans speakers arrive in Greece bringing with them the Proto-Greek language that would evolve into Mycenaean Greek and then the later Greek dialects of Classical Greece

2,340–2,316 BC – reign of Lugalzagesi (Lugalzaggesi; c. 2,294–2,270 BC under short chronology); the last Sumerian king who began his rule from Umma, and who conquered Sumer as king of the third dynasty of Uruk; he conquered Kish, Lagash, Ur, Nippur, Larsa, and Uruk. He made Uruk his new capital (see the map here)

2,100–1,800 BC – the Sintashta culture of Indo-European proto-Indo-Iranian speakers, a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the north Eurasian steppe; the earliest known chariots found in Sintashta burials (see map here)

before c. 2,000 BC – migration of Hittites into Anatolia, either from Balkans or the Caspian Sea, possibly from 3,000 to 2,000 BC. Some scholars put the arrival as early as c.4,000 BC. For Sturtevant’s Indo-Hittite hypothesis (1926) which places the split of Indo-Hittite from Pre-Proto-Indo-European language as early as 7,000 BC, see here. For another view, see here

2,000 BC – possible human population at 27 million

c. 2,000–900 BC – the Andronovo culture, a Bronze Age culture in western Siberia and the west Asiatic steppe; the culture of the Indo-Iranians; Andronovo culture gave rise to the Saka (Scythians), Sarmatians and Alans.

c. 1,207–1,178 BC – the reign of Suppiluliuma II (the son of Tudhaliya IV), the last known king of the New Kingdom of the Hittite Empire (on short chronology)

1,200–c. 900 BC – the Proto-Villanovan culture in Italy (either early Etruscan or proto-Italic); possibly two waves of Tyrsenian-speakers came to Italy from north-west Anatolia c.1,100 BC and 900 BC; and c. 800 BC to Lemnos

c. 1,184 BC – Troy VIIa destroyed by war: there is evidence of fire and slaughter, which brought Troy VIIa to an end

c. 1,180 BC – the Hittite capital Hattusa burnt to the ground after invasions by the Kaskans, Phrygians and Bryges

c. 1,178 BC – invasion of Sea peoples during the battle of Djahy, between the forces of Ramesses III, fought in Djahy or modern day southern Lebanon

c. 1,155–1,025 BC – Dynasty IV of Babylon (from Isin)

c.1,150 – final destruction of citadel of Mycenae

c. 1,126–1,103 BC – reign of Nebuchadnezzar I

c. 1,100 BC – great Bronze Age civilizations collapse, probably by a severe drought; end of the Minoan Warm Period

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Julian Assange recently tweeted out a series of interesting comments on multicultural identity politics in the US as follows:

America was historically a majority white nation. By opening America’s borders to a tidal wave of Third World mass immigration and the relentless pushing of identity politics for everybody but white people by the Cultural Left, the US white population has been driven to a type of implicit white identity politics too, which is what Trumpism was in part about.

If the same policies are continued, there will be a massive shift to explicit white identitarian movements in America, and in Europe too, since white people will start to realise that – with low fertility rates and massive immigration – they will become minorities in their own nations, and perhaps even hated and persecuted minorities.

As Western nations are turned into multicultural states, modern democracy and politics will cease to exist as we know them. Instead, Western nations will see the Islamisation of their societies, their transformation into dysfunctional, Balkanised areas with rent-seeking nepotistic and mutually hostile ethnic and religious groups fighting for control of the state, and in conflict because of their own mutually-incompatible ethnic/religious interests. In that world, white identitarian politics will be a matter of survival for white people.

Quite possibly, democracy itself will not even survive in an extremely multicultural Europe or America, and Julian Assange pointed to this fact about multicultural Singapore:

This is also why the kind of class-based politics of economic justice – so beloved by the old Labour, Social Democratic, or Democratic Socialist Left – cannot survive in the multicultural society. An effective Social Democratic vision for the Western world – or indeed virtually any society – with left heterodox economic policies entails a high trust and, whether leftists like it or not, a highly homogeneous society.

Now you would think that a sane, reasonable, rational Left would actually want to create a society where its own politics can work, and be opposed to the looming multicultural disaster. But – in reality – most of the Left these days is unwittingly in favour of the disaster happening, even if they don’t consciously understand what the consequences of their policies will be.

If people on the Left wanted to halt and reverse the rise of far-right white identitarian politics, then the pragmatic solution is clear enough: support closed borders and immigration restriction, and work to create a sane Left that is purged of Cultural Leftism and its identity politics. The Left should also support some kind of civilised Nationalism too, with the understanding that nations are based on social cohesion, and that people need national homelands where they are majorities to flourish.

The traditional Leftist concern for the Third World (which I support) can then be based around reform of the international economic institutions, the abolition of Neoliberalism, and development aid using Post Keynesian economics, so that people in the Third World can attain strong economic and social development in their own nations, instead of wanting to come in the millions into ours.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Both Austrian and Neoclassical economics stem from the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s. Although there are important differences between both schools, they have enough in common that is flawed to make them both subject to this critique:

(1) both Austrian and Neoclassical theory ultimately hold that free markets have a tendency towards general equilibrium, and hence economic coordination by means of a flexible wage and price system, and a (supposed) coordinating loanable funds market that equates savings and investment. This is an empirically false view of market economies: it is essentially the product of Marginalists from the 1870s onwards who had physics envy and wanted to model a market economy like a self-equilibrating physical system.

(2) the core Neoclassical and Austrian model in (1) is false because:

(i) market systems are complex human systems subject to degrees of non-calculable probability and future uncertainty, so that market economies would not converge to general equilibrium states even if wages and prices were perfectly flexible. This makes human decision-making highly different to the fundamental model proposed by Neoclassical economics (even with their modern ad hoc models that invoke asymmetric information and bounded rationality), and, even if Austrians supposedly accept subjective expectations in decision making, they fail spectacularly to apply it properly in their economic theory. At the heart of this failure of both Neoclassical and Austrian theory is the mistaken ergodic axiom.

(i) the modern money supply is endogenous because broad money creation is credit-driven (that is, created by private banks and its quantity is determined by the private demand for it), and, furthermore, a truly independent money supply function does not actually exist in an endogenous money world, since credit money comes into existence because it has been demanded, and so the broad money supply is not independent of money demand, but can be demand-led;

(ii) money can never be neutral, neither in the short run nor in the long run.

(iii) the direction of causation is generally from credit demand (via business loans to finance labour and other factor inputs) to money supply increases, contrary to the direction of causation as assumed in the quantity theory, and

(iv) changes in the general price level are a highly complex result of many factors, and not some simple function of money supply.

(4) the (non-Keynesian) Neoclassicals and Austrians have an obsessive-compulsive fixation with the supply-side, but this cripples their economic theory. In our capital-rich Western economies historically (and once we re-implement some kind of industrial policy now), what mostly constrains our prosperity is the demand-side, not the supply-side.

[sc. Keynes’s] ... theory of involuntary unemployment is perfectly simple and can be expressed in a paragraph, or in a sentence. If you express it in a sentence, you simply say that enterprise is the launching of resources upon a project whose outcome you do not, and cannot, know. The business of enterprise involves investment, the investing of large amounts of resources--huge sums of money--in things whose outcome you cannot be certain of, which could perfectly well turn into a disaster or a brilliant success.

The people who do this kind of investing are essentially gamblers and they can lose their nerve. And if they decide to withdraw from trade, they sweep their chips up from the table. If they decide it’s too risky, if their nerve gives out and they can’t bring themselves to go on investing, they cease to give employment and that is the explanation. When business is at all unsettled--when there’s any sign at all of depression--or when there’s been a lot of investment and people have run out of ideas, or when their goods are not selling quite as fast as they have been, they no longer know what the marginal value product of an extra man is—it’s non-existent. How can you say that a certain number of men have a certain marginal productivity when you can’t know what the per unit value of the goods they would produce if you employed them would sell for?”“An Interview with G.L.S. Shackle,” The Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring 1983.

This is actually a splendid summing up of what Keynes’s theory is about, and why both Austrian and Neoclassical economics are nonsense.